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Research has shown that languages of multilinguals interact and result in affecting a speaker’s phonetics and phonology. Areas that will be covered in this essay include the effects of assimilation and dissimilation, short-term interaction effects, and effects on articulation and perception.

It has been found that languages that share similar phonetic systems interact with each other in bilinguals, which can manifest itself through the effects of assimilation. In a study conducted by Sundara et al. (2006), assimilation effects were found in bilingual speakers of American English and Canadian French. In their study, they measured VOTs of French and English stops (/t/and/d/) by splitting up the participants into groups of speakers of monolingual American English, monolingual French, and bilingual American English and Canadian French. It was shown that the bilinguals’ stop data for English were more like the monolingual French stops than the monolingual English speakers’ stops. For example, the bilingual English stop /d/ had a much shorter VOT than the English monolinguals’ /d/ production. Therefore, their results showed that the bilinguals’ French was affecting their production of their English stops through assimilation.

Another effect of language interaction of shared phonetic systems is dissimilation. In Flege et al. (2003) study on Italians in Canada, they measured the English diphthong /eɪ/ in Italian speakers in Canada and separated them into groups based on if they arrived in Canada early or later in life and if their Italian use in Canada was low or high. They found that early speakers with low Italian use demonstrated an overshoot of the English diphthong, resulting in vowels that demonstrated a larger change in quality than the English target. In contrast, the group that arrived later in life demonstrated a production closer to /e/, which is an Italian vowel. This study shows the effects of dissimilation as – in respect to their L2 (English) – the group that overshoots the English vowel results in a vowel that is further away from their L1 (Italian) rather than closer to it. It was suggested that dissimilation may occur in multilinguals in order to distinguish between phonemes as clearly as possible.

Despite these language interaction effects, a study by Sancier & Fowler (1997) found that the interaction effects of languages in multilinguals can be short-term. In this study, they measured the VOT of the Portuguese /p/ and /t/ and the English aspirated /pʰ/ and /tʰ/ in a bilingual speaker of Portuguese and English after travelling to Brazil. They measured their VOTs in the US three months before travelling to Brazil, just after coming back from Brazil, and again three months later in the US. The findings showed that after a stay in Brazil, the /t/ and /p/ VOTs of Portuguese were shorter but increased again after three months. This shows that interaction effects of languages in multilingual VOT do occur in the short term but can return to initial levels once back in a predominantly monolingual setting.

It has also been shown that multilingualism affects a speaker’s phonology. In Bosch et al (2011 )’s study on Spanish and Catalan vowels, it was found that although multilinguals learned to articulate the phones of a language, they did not distinguish them correctly as phonemes as a result of not learning the phonological rules that came with them. In this study, it was found that Spanish-dominant speakers of Catalan could articulate an allophonic distinction between the Catalan vowels [e] and [ɛ] but did not make a distinction between them as phonemes. This was shown when they used them in the wrong Catalan words. This shows that multilinguals who can correctly produce the sound system of a language need to also learn the phonotactic rules that accompany them in order to use them correctly.

Bilingualism can also affect the articulatory settings (how the articulators such as the tongue are used) within a language. Kirkham et al. (2017) conducted a study on Twi and Ghanaian English to measure how articulatory settings are used in multilinguals. Measurements of the tongue position during the production of vowels were taken using ultrasound analysis on groups of multilingual Twi and Ghanaian English speakers and English monolinguals. It was found that the midsagittal profile of the multilingual individuals displayed an intermediate position between the English tense and lax vowels and the Twi ATR and RTR vowels. It could be argued that the multilinguals’ articulatory settings changed to compensate for the different tongue positions by going midway to enable speakers to be understood but transition between vowels of the different languages with less muscular effort. Overall, this study suggests that articulatory settings can change in multilinguals.

It has also been found that multilingualism can affect the perception of sounds, especially when a speaker is attuned to a particular language setting. In Gonzales et als. (2003) study, participants were separated into Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals and performed a two-alternative forced-choice task between sounds on a continuum between [b] and [pʰ]. It was found that when primed to hear Spanish, bilinguals were more likely to attribute the ambiguous sound to the end of the continuum most akin to Spanish stops and vice versa when primed for English. This had no effect on English monolinguals. This suggests that when primed for a particular language (as in a monolingual setting), multilinguals will perceive sounds more alike those belonging to the language’s sound system even if they are more acoustically similar to the language they have not been primed to.

In a study by Mann (1986), multilingualism was found to have interesting effects on both perception and articulation. This study looked at English-learning Japanese speakers who could not distinguish between the English /l/ and /ɹ/ – which is likely due to Japanese phonology having only one approximant /ɾ/. Despite this, Mann found that they did produce a distinction between the sounds /al/ and /aɹ/like English speakers. This suggests that the Japanese speakers recognised the different phonemes on some higher level of encoding. Cross-linguistically, this suggests that multilinguals may be able to perceive differences in phonemes even when they are unaware of them and still articulate this difference unconsciously. 

In conclusion, multilingualism has been shown to affect the phonetics and phonology of an individual’s languages through assimilation, dissimilation, and lack of understanding of phonotactic rules, as well as on levels of articulation and perception.